A tangled story of corruption

A tangled story of corruption in the attorney general’s
office in El Salvador is playing out in El Salvador’s courts. El Salvador’s former attorney general, Luis Martinez was arrested
on August 22, 2015. Here is a brief
summary of this complicated web of corruption:

Luis Martinez in custody

Luis Martinez was arrested along with Salvadoran businessman
Enrique Rais. Rais has a number of
business interests including the operation of El Salvador’s largest
landfill. The allegations against Martinez
and Rais involve prosecutorial and judicial corruption in which Martinez accepted
favors from Rais in return for protecting El Salvador’s king of solid waste.

Many of the dealings between Rais and Martinez had been previously described in reporting by investigative
journalist Hector Silva Avalos who publishes the online journalism site
RevistaFactum.

The allegations
against Rais and Martinez involve Martinez allowing the use of the attorney
general’s office to attack Rais’ enemies through litigation, including two
Canadian former business partners of Rais who have a long-running legal dispute
with Rais. As an example of the how
Rais works, when an aide left his company and began working for the Canadians,
both the aide and his wife found themselves thrown in jail by prosecutors
directed by Martinez.

Enrique Rais

There was a preliminary
hearing on the charges against Rais and Martinez over the weekend of August
26-28, 2016 to determine whether they would be held in custody pending the
conclusion of the investigation and a trial.
Current Attorney General Douglas Melendez called
that hearing a circus and strongly suggested that the judge was biased and
manipulating the results to favor the defendants. At the conclusion of the hearing, the judge
decided that Rais and Martinez would not be held in custody, but could be
released on bond. Prosecutors have said
they
will appeal.

But that did not produce freedom for the former Attorney
General. The current attorney general proceeded to
hold Martinez on a new
set of charges related to Father Antonio Rodriguez. As readers of the blog will remember, “Padre
Toño” was arrested in 2014 and charged with providing contraband cellphones
to gang leaders in prison. Rodriguez pled
guilty and was freed after agreeing to leave the country. Now it appears that Martinez crossed the
line in his zeal to prosecute the Spanish priest. He is charged with having divulged
wiretapped conversations of Padre Tono of an “intimate nature” to the Roman
Catholic bishops of El Salvador. (El
Faro first
reported this story in 2014)
Presented with these charges, a different Salvadoran judge refused to
release Luis Martinez and ordered him held over for trial.

Current attorney general Douglas Melendez, who replaced
Martinez, has his hands full. In
addition to prosecuting his predecessor and former boss, Melendez is overseeing
a major prosecution against the money men of the MS-13 gang, just raided
several properties of a prominent businessman as part of a corruption investigation
against former president Mauricio Funes, and is charged with prosecuting war
crimes following the repeal of the post civil war amnesty law. All of this as well as running an office
charged with investigating criminal violence in the country with the highest civilian
homicide rate in the world. It’s not at
all clear that he can be successful.